03 - FIVE WAYS OF DISCONNECT CREATED BY TRAUMA. HOW DISCONNECT AFFECT TRAUMA HEALING?

Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darza, author, trauma psychologist and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Welcome to my YouTube channel. We're going to be talking today about what trauma does. How does trauma impact you and how it creates a disconnect. If you have read my book, or if you're already reading, by the way, the Trauma Map, it's recently got published, few days ago, I talk a lot about how trauma may create a disconnect within yourself. What do I mean by disconnect? It's a sense of losing a connection to yourself or to parts of yourself. And in the book I talk a lot about that. And there are different five areas that we're going to be looking at today. So here are the five ways that you may find yourself disconnected from yourself. One, from your mind. I'm going to talk about each of them with detail. One, from your mind. Two, from your body. Three, from your heart, emotions. Four, from loved ones, family, friends, your support system. And the fifth one is from God, spirituality, or from a higher power. So we're going to talk about each of them, what it means, how it shows up in your life. And then on my second video, I'm going to tell you guys about what to do about each of them. By the way, beginning from the chapter four, you can actually find a lot of this information here to really understand what these signs mean for each person with really good detailed explanations and case examples. So let's talk about how one disconnects from their mind. In the moment of a very stressful event, or of course, a traumatic incident, the thinking brain shuts down and really leaves you in a sort of confused state. In fact, if you've heard of the fight, flight or freeze response to trauma, this is what we're talking about. When something is too overwhelming and you don't know what to do with that, your defense system comes online and finds a way to protect you. This is how you can disconnect from your mind by actually shutting your thinking brain and not being able to make a decision. Because it's not really about making a decision at that time. It's usually about survival. So it's like, how do I run? How do I protect myself? It's a very instinctual response. It's not something you think with your mind. So what happens if you are disconnected from your mind? What's the aftermath of this incident, let's say, or of this reaction, of this defense mechanism is that you may find yourself chronically confused or really doubting yourself. Or having a lot of negative thoughts about yourself, or having negative thoughts in general about life. So if you're finding yourself really harsh on yourself, blaming yourself, not knowing how to make decisions, or not having the capacity to think clearly, this can be one of the signs that you are disconnected from your mind. Let's talk about disconnect from your body. This is a very, very common one because especially if your body was under threat. So this could be a physical abuse, it could be a sexual abuse, it could be a car accident, it could be a natural disaster like fires or earthquakes and such. You may find a way to really leave your body and go away with your thoughts in order to protect yourself from further pain. In fact, some people even talk about seeing themselves lying down, sort of watching themselves lying down and being hurt and not feeling the pain. That is one way a person can protect themselves from a painful and traumatic situation. This is actually a defense mechanism. And I say that because some people think defense mechanisms are bad. Defense mechanisms are not bad. They are there to protect you. So rather than being angry at them, it's very important that you stay actually acknowledging them, validating them, and understanding that it's there to protect you. Imagine if in the middle of a car accident, you're all of a sudden feeling all the pain in your body. People talk about sort of having this almost like adrenaline rush where I don't know, I was bleeding, but I still was able to do everything that I needed to do. And then I ended up in the hospital. Then I realized how much pain I was in. But in the moment I wasn't feeling the pain. Yes, you see, the body's very intelligent. It actually helps you to deal with that painful moment. And it's not something we do or we do it voluntarily, I should say, but it's an organic reaction to just pain. So be thankful that in that moment you are checking out, you are finding a way to deal with it. But the problem becomes, if this is your chronic life, if you are constantly living your body because you can't tolerate day to day life, is when you have to find ways to of course, make peace with your body and with what happened. That's going to be my next video. Let me continue with the other areas that I meant. I mentioned in the beginning of the video. Okay, so we did the mind, the body. The third one is, I call it heart or really emotions. Right. It's very similar to what I said about the body. When you're in front of a very stressful situation or traumatic incident, you find Ways to shut down emotionally in order to deal with, with the pain. Let's think in this one, a different kind of example from childhood. If all your life you were neglected by your parents or you were abused by your father, and if each time you're hurt and abused, if you really felt the sadness or the pain of that, you'd probably be chronically depressed and you, you wouldn't be able to go to school the next day. So you find ways to disconnect those feelings, you put them aside in order to live your life in the most productive way. Okay, let's imagine you've been pushing all the feelings down and it starts building up. Then what happens? You have a daily stressor such as you're in traffic, there's traffic jam, and you're trying to get somewhere and boom, the traffic light, the red light stops you and you have to really get there on time. And you find yourself getting really angry and maybe yelling and cursing and, and your little ones are sitting next to you and you're wondering, why did I react that way? Oh, my mom must be crazy. Well, not really. What happens is if you have been pushing all your feelings down on a regular basis, not just with the trauma, but even day to day, then inappropriate moment, a feeling can just show up like this as an explosion. So this is one of the negative symptoms of pushing feelings aside or pushing feelings down, as I was saying. But again, don't be surprised that you are doing that. It is just a sign that you have been accumulating things and that you haven't had a chance to digest them. So I'm going to help you in the next video of basically I'm going to teach you tools of how to, how to deal with emotions in a much more positive way, rather than thinking that you have to open everything all at once. All right, let's come to the fourth item. So the first three, by the way, are signs of disconnect inside. The fourth and the fifth items are actually a sense of disconnection from you to the outside world. So in the fourth one is usually the loved ones, your friends, family members. This is a bit of a different situation because there are many reasons why a person may not want to share what happened to them with others and they might end up isolating themselves. You may think that nobody will understand you. You may think they will blame you for something that happened. You may think they will say something actually to make you feel even worse, which unfortunately happens. A lot of ignorant people say things like, oh, it's not a Big deal, or oh, it happens to everyone kind of thing. Or you may just feel like if I tell someone, I'm really gonna break down and cry, and I can't tolerate that. So you may make a conscious decision of really not sharing this, an incident that happened to you with anyone. But I, I want to tell you it's very important actually not to isolate yourself. So just watch out to see how you are reacting following a trauma, if you are not wanting to share with people or if you are really finding yourself very alone with it. And again, in the next videos, we're going to talk about how to open up in the most supportive way and how to find supportive people. And the fifth one is a disconnect. A sense of really loss of faith in God, in the universe, spirituality, whatever your faith might be. And that's a very common one. Because if you've experienced an injustice, a painful situation where you think you didn't deserve, you may really start, start questioning life or God in general. If you believe God is supposed to be all loving, it might surprise you that how come you or a child who was so innocent got hurt in such a bad way? And that's when a lot of the people start questioning their beliefs. Or sometimes it can actually take you to the other side where you might find an extra connection, where you might find that's the only thing that's calming you down or soothing you down. So you may turn towards spirituality or God. So these are the five areas of a person that can feel disconnect following a trauma. And in the next video, let's talk about what to do about that. So remember, trauma creates disconnect, healing creates reconnect, stay connected.